


The Choice

by mademoisellePlume



Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Gen, References to Suicide, Suicide Disparaging, disrespect to a corpse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-18
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2017-12-15 08:44:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,942
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/847555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mademoisellePlume/pseuds/mademoisellePlume
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before she died, time stopped twice. Once for the Ellimist. Once for another.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Death

In the space between the whisper of love and the fall of a paw, it appeared, and the scene went still but for one slender figure of a girl. The words hung in her mind, the next word lost to the next moment.

The Drode sighed. "So romantic. The dashing, self-sacrificing hero whispering sweet nothings to her love, eyes fastened to the face she never saw enough of as she's struck down."

"Let me have my death in peace, lizard." She snarled, turning to face it. She blanched as her foot pushed aside the body of the snake that had been her cousin.

"If you're that desperate to die. I didn't think you were that sort, though." The Drode shrugged and turned away.

"What sort!?"

"The sort that wants to die. A coward. Didn't you once say 'how big a moron do you have to be not to figure out that at least if you stay alive you have some hope, as opposed to being dead and having zero'?" Artfully, it looked back at her and laughed. "So angry! They're your own words!"

"Do you think I want to die? No one sane wants to die!"

"Fortunately sane is not a phrase most would apply to you."  
Her fists clenched. "Did you pause the moment of my death just to taunt me?"

"As fun as it is, no. I'm here to remind you of a promise. And to perhaps delay your final breath some."

Rachel scowled fiercely at the awful pawn of Crayak. "What are you talking about? I've made you no promises."

"But I have made them to you." The Drode waddled across the floor and picked up the raggedly severed head of the snake in its delicate hands. It was still wet with blood and bear spittle. "Remember, Rachel? When we first met?" It held the snake's lower jaw in one hand, and the top jaw in the other, and the Drode moved them in tandem with its words, creating a macabre puppet show. "'If you ever find yourself desperate, Rachel. At an end." Here, it paused and sniggered. "In need. Remember this: Your cousin's life is your ticket to salvation in the arms of Crayak." The snake's mouth was closed, and tossed over the Drode's shoulder carelessly.

"This again! How many times do you and Crayak need to be told no! I am not killing Jake! Even if I would, which I won't, I can't!" Rachel shouted, her temper flaring, her eyes hard.

"But Rachel! You already have!" The Drode spread its arms wide. "Killed him as surely as if you snapped his throat up in your jaws!"

"I- I never did a thing to him-" She was too angry for words, outrage and hatred filling up her veins.

The Drode interrupted her furious denial and waved at the screen. "Look at him! Look at that face! He's watched the cousin he sent on a kamikaze mission kill the brother he'd vowed to save, killed him on his orders, and now he's watching her die. All at his word. The bird won't forgive him. He won't forgive himself. This is a killing guilt. This is a lifetime of depression, and he'll die by taking his own life, or throwing it away. You killed him Rachel, by taking his orders. A beautiful murder. A poetic assassination. You've earned Crayak's salvation."

Rachel lunged for the creature, almost blind with fury and sudden, stunning guilt. She missed, the creature outpacing her speed easily. She was only a girl at the moment, after all. "Who says I want it!?"

"So you want to die?" The Drode asked, cocking it's head to the side.

"No!" She shouted, face reddening with her frustrated anger. The perfect simplicity of the moment still frozen around them, where she had nothing to do, no possibility of surviving, and all that had to be done was let the blow fall.

"Do you think the Ellimist will save you? Can save you?" The Drode asked as Rachel attacked him again, not having any difficulty in evading her.

"Do you think that matters? I was ready to die!" Her words made her throat ache, to say it out loud was to speak her readiness for the inevitability of the end of this mission.

"You were wishing so desperately to live." Rachel screamed at the awful truth. "How about this. You die. We know the Ellimist will grab you. To speak to you. To thank you for being his pawn. We let you go. And if you change your mind, at the very last second, just say two words, and we will rescue your essence. The rules will allow that, the promise we made has been quite longstanding to you."

"You're going to take my soul?" She scoffed, her eyes overbright and her lips twisted in a snarl.

"Do you think we can't learn from our enemies? The Chee took the spirit of the Pemalites and put them in dogs. We can be far more inventive. You can be far more useful."

"I won't annihilate things. I won't be a monster."

"We'll give you power, point you in a direction, and let you go. What you do is your choice. But you will be our creature, and you won't help the Ellimist. And this will be our repayment for Jake's death."

"I'm not going to accept this."

He told her the two words anyways, with a little smirk.

The moment continued.

And the blow fell.

The Ellimist did come to her, and speak to her. And explained himself, and his side, and everything that had brought her to her fate.

He was there to honor her, but not save her. And the desperate, urgent desire to live, to cling to life, welled up in her. She wanted to stay. She asked a question, needing to know the answer even as she tried to make a choice that weighed what morality she had left against the promise of sweet life.

He told her she mattered.

"Yeah." And she made her choice and spoke the words. "Okay, then." And again, knowing the moment of no return was coming. "Okay, then."

She wondered if-

A small strand of space-time went dark and coiled into nothingness.

  
Another strand, much larger, and a brighter, burning red, burst into existence.


	2. Rebirth

The rules were simple. She did nothing that violated the rules of their game, she did nothing as a favour to the Ellimist, and she could otherwise do what she pleased.

Power thrummed in her veins, and the price for that was... nothing more then she'd done already. No orders. No awful duty.

Well, saying power 'thrummed in her veins' wasn't very accurate. She didn't really have veins anymore. Not unless she wanted them. And really, she didn't.

For now she was a flaming force of power and strength. The essence of herself, supercharged and destructive, out naked in the void of space. No body, no form. Just thoughts, flickering power, and energy.

A long time ago she might have described this as being 'godlike.'

Now she knew enough that 'quasi-demonic' would be more appropriate.

If she wanted, she could go to earth. Tell them what had happened. Or lie. Say she'd survived, force her brilliance into a human form. She could do it.

Rachel kept moving towards the edges of the galaxy.

Time meant nothing at all to her and she disregarded it, she saw stars born, and she saw them die. She saw planets of every colour, and dodged furious meteors. She spooked Skrit Na and she laughed and played chicken with an Andalite ship.

And when she was far past any species she'd ever heard about when she had the anchor of humanity, she'd found another war.

The insubstantial creature of power paused and observed.

What she learned was that these two species had warred for all their time on their planet. The Giondei were a species that resembled rodents as big as bears, with far sharper teeth and claws. The Guddin were a species that were much like lizards with scaled spider legs, delicate but oddly beautiful. They were dying much faster, their legs easy to snap for the brutal Giondei.

Rachel made a decision and then she flared as she descended.

Within a quarter of a rotation of their planet around the sun, the Giondei were vastly low in numbers, having been destroyed in the most utterly brutal ways, and the Guddin had been engaging a spurt in fertility, their eggs no longer stolen and eaten by the rival species.

What she knew immidiately was that this had made her feel alive. Her power flared brightly, ridding her of any remnant of the caked on blood or the assumed shape she'd taken on this planet.

So her war for her planet was done.

So her life had been given.

Nothing said she couldn't fight for the underdogs throughout the galaxy.

In fact,  she decided, speeding faster through the cosmos,that's exactly what she would do.

She would find wars and take the downtrodden, the desperate, the side where they were like the humans had been, like the hork-bajir had been. And she would annihilate their foes.

Here was her purpose. Her reason to exist after everything else had been taken from her. Her life, her body, her friends, her family, her love. But she could fight. And she could win.

Rachel's cry of victory reverberated around the edges of stars.

There was the Hikarads that she destroyed for the Axuryens. They had delicate exoskeletons and were squished like bugs, but the weapons they had built to compensate for that had been doing hideous things to the poor Axuryens. And it had been such fun, roaming amongst them, as large as the elephant she'd first fought as, and felt the bodies snap and crunch under her improvised feet.

In a corner of the galaxy there were the Klakpolons, a species that resembled a puppy reared up on it's hind legs that never aged, down to the soft downy fur and heart-melting eyes. She devastated their enemies quite thoroughly. And then she saw what the Klakpolons had been doing to the few orphans of the now-endangered Tixle. And rage consumed her so fiercely that both the homeplanets of the Tixle and Klakpolons were reduced to rubble.

Light-years away from that nasty scene there was the species 320953583, or so they were when she first met them. The number was slowly going down, as the population lessened. They were slowly being destroyed by a disease that was sentient, that shared a mind and was evolving itself to strike at the heart of the species (319042009, 318943754...) and slowly but surely decimate it. Rachel turned herself into a cleansing air and flooded the lungs of each and every one of them, dragging the disease out with her, and burning it in front of their intended victims. She noticed the numbers continued to go down, but at less of such a shocking pace. She discovered, with a jolt of horror, that they had their own hivemind, but it was smaller, and a scarce amount of them belonged to it. And that the count went down as it included more minds. But, they were grateful to her, were mostly independent, and had pretty, elfin-looking faces. And they were the first to name her. "Mother!" They cried. "War-Mother!"

The Pudmar and the Fuhreedix were evenly matched before she came to them, and they each suffered heavy casualities. She might have left them alone if she'd not been called as she turned away, the Fuhreedix begging her blessing, begging her favour. <Come to us, War-Mother, bring us victory!> It didn't seem important to find out how they'd heard of her, she just embraced the name and the role, and gave them the victory they craved. The Pudmar had been brutish anyways, she decided after.

Across the whole wide universe, she settled dire wars and reversed the flow of genocides.

And Crayak was pleased with the force of righteous destruction he'd wrought.

And as Rachel burnt the life out of a planet of a species with more tentacles then words for kindness, Jake stood before the world and broke before the accusations of genocide.


	3. A Red Star

The War Mother was still young, fresh and new, but her legend was ringing out through galaxies. She could give power, she could fell empires, she was a force to be reckoned with. More then anything that came before her because there was no holding back. No schemes. No non-interference. She did as she willed and left more destruction in her wake then survival, but she knew well that those who were destroyed had deserved their fates.

Her origins were a secret known to herself, the Crayak, and the Drode, and she'd seen neither her Master nor his errand boy since she'd been reborn.

She wasn't sure how many earth years had passed before a ship moved past her as she drifted between massacres. Something within this ship was familiar, and she followed in its wake, willing herself to near-invisibility.

It was a yeerk ship. It had an air of danger and hostility. She'd never seen a design quite like this, but it had the yeerkish design, all sharp-edges.

Something about it smelt familiar.

Maybe she should crush it, just for old times' sake.

Or she could follow it, see if it was heading back to a larger yeerk fleet, and stomp out the slugs once and for all.

That sounded like a plan. It was a plan that curled somewhere deep inside of the being she was now, that little piece of her that was human, that had died somewhere while mattering, that still had blood on her maw and claw.

Destroying the yeerks was right.

 

Before long, they came within range of-

She pulsed with pain, flashing bright red as memories assaulted her. The falling claws, those final moments, telling Tobias she loved him.

The Blade Ship.

One hailed another, and she tapped that interaction, hearing it with untrue ears.

Pretending to be from Star Trek? Yeerks infesting humans with such enjoyment of science fiction and still aping their ways was odd behaviour, after this long in space.

"I've always thought of myself as more of a Captain Kirk." Said the human-controller who soon identified itself as Rakich-Four-Six-Nine-One of the Flet Niaar Pool. She might have smirked if she had a face any longer.

Tensions raised and soon 'Kirk' broke, admitting that the Empire was in ruins, which pleased the War-Mother greatly. Crush these ships, and their filthy race would be finished forever.

The other controller offered allegiance under 'The One.'

The War-Mother did not know of any such 'one,' and paid closer attention. The controller seemed manic, and said he would 'invoke' The One, and the little yeerk ship's captain seemed as confused as she was.

Then the front of the ship, the front of the bridge began to glow, and the War-Mother's entire being pulsed again at what she saw. Different faces dissolved into one another. The second-last was the face of a species she'd once saved, a species that called itself by an ever-decreasing number.

The last was a comrade. But for the mouth that appeared and marred Ax's Andalite visage.

And demanded the presence of Jake.

The War-Mother, unseen and insubstantial, surrounding this ship and watching what unfolded, could not find words to describe what she felt when she abandoned watching the feed to looking into the ship itself. Three strangers. Marco. Jake. Tobias.

Jake looked around, and confirmed that Marco, Marco, had requested ruthless, reckless decisions of him. And he ordered them to ram the Blade Ship.

His smile was hers.

The War-Mother pulled back, and watched, watched them ram the ship, watched them undoubtably die, and she screamed, and she reached out, and she blazed.

"War-Mother!" Ax's face cried, sounding pleased. "You are here to help us again!"

"I saved you! You devour each other to create this amalgam of one, this wretched hivemind! You devour others to add to it! I would not care, but you take my friends? You kill my friends! I end you." Rachels voice was a shrieking that echoes through the solar system, her wrath was terrible.

The One looks confused. "But-Mother-"

"I am not your Mother." Rachel denounced the title, starting to rend the Blade ship into bits, finishing the job the brave little ship started. "I was reborn on this ship, but I am still me. I am Rachel and I will have revenge."

"Rachel...?" The One whispered, wondrously, and she turned to it next. She parsed The One into souls and destroyed each of its original kind, beyond any chance of revival. She released Ax from his fate, and she howled her pain when she realized she had run out of things to destroy.

Power overtook her, everything she'd become overheating to an unbearable extent, the space around her heating up. Every bit of debris nearby was consumed by the limitless flames of her fierce anger.

She screamed at the Crayak, she wept for herself and she burned up every aspect of what she had ever been in penace for what she had done. The creation of that which had taken those who part of her long-dead human heart still loved so dearly. That which was once Rachel became an inferno of brilliant red light that she fed herself into until she was gone in totality.

Cassie, many years later, watched a beautiful red star bloom in the night sky, and wished that she could hope that her friends would ever return.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this story!


End file.
